and other contemplations…

Category: Gender

A surgeon in the ER. Pressure. A mother with triplets. Pressure. David Bowie… I’m here all week gentlepeople.

I, however, no pressure. I don’t hold a particularly stressful job nor have I had life throw me any crazy curveballs. I have a fortress family, spoils of friends, great (ex)boyfriends, and a mostly non-traumatic childhood. There’s no objective form of pressure as far as a prairie dog can see.

Well. Except for one pesky little thing – a phantom threat imposed by the misinterpreted knowledge that my existence has to make up for all the very real pressures my parents underwent to afford me the right to glide through life like a white man. (Say that three times fast).

First generation immigrants know this threat well. Sometimes it’s explicit – the label of your naturalized citizenship thrown at you like a dirty towel of murky privilege and soiled tradition.

“Ugh, you’re so Canadian, so ungrateful.”

My mother has a colourful tongue and takes creative liberties with vulgarities, yet the dirtiest thing I’ve seen fall from her lips is that word, “Canadian.”

Other times it’s more implicit – an understanding that you have to be “more than.”

More than you would have been otherwise.

For me, this wasn’t necessarily cultivated by my parents. The seed was sown by an immigration officer in a Syrian embassy as he floundered through the depths of would-be immigrants’ motivations, taking the scenic route through my mother’s as she pointed at her two daughters and reiterated their gender.

Women. Poor things.

There were other motivations of course, but “for-my-daughters-to-have-better-opportunities” is what made it impossible for me to ever accept “less than.”

Enter 2017. This year has managed to make me feel so very “less than.”

I tried. I failed. I tried again. I failed differently. I stopped trying. I felt like a failure for not trying. I tried to try. That failed. I’m tired.

And I’m grateful. As cheesy as that is. It’s been a strange year for so many reasons (the world going up in flames included), but I was simultaneously humbled and reinforced.

I lost my temper but found my voice. I broke down but practiced how to build people up. I cut ties but mended old wounds. I forgot my place but remembered my home.

The term came about after Professors Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter set out to disprove the notion that women leaders cause financial collapse or failure in FTSE 100 companies. They found that, in fact, women were appointed to leadership positions as companies were already headed for failure while men rose to cushy positions in periods of stability and growth.

This obviously has a few implications:

1) To a lazy observer, it would look like women leaders are underperforming. It’s the equivalent of having to race against Michael Phelps while wearing 50 pound weights. Or, you know, racing against Michael Phelps period.

3) It maintains the status quo — women in precarious leadership positions are seen as less threatening and easier targets of criticism and blame, especially with regard to their femaleness.

I want to zone in on that third point for a second. There seems to be a bit of fine print associated with the ability of women to break glass ceilings and rise to the top, at least in name. The secret ingredient is apparently relatively simple: be as non-threatening as possible. How, you ask?

Well, an article I stumbled across today has the perfect answer. And you can buy it in aisle 3 of your local grocery store. Revel in Revlon and watch your status rise. (Revlon should put me on its marketing team).

I’m just going to paste the last paragraph of the article here because I want you to experience the incredulous joy too:

Should really we all be battling in opposition to stereotypes like these? Of program we need to. But if they at any time go away it certainly will never be in the close to long run. And which is why wise ladies who want to be revered as leaders so typically switch into blondes, Berdahl says. “If ladies are selecting to dye their hair blonde, you will find anything strategic about the option,” she explained to HuffPo. “If the offer is female, disarming and childlike, you can get away with more assertive, impartial and masculine actions.”

So go ahead–make that appointment with your hairdresser. We may well want to adjust the entire world. But initial we have to achieve the positions that will enable us do it.

Hi again. Still here? You didn’t throw your device at the wall? Just me? Ok, good. I have some numbers for you:

Research out of UBC’s Sauder School of Business is investigating this phenomenon of overrepresentation of blonde women in positions of leadership as compared to more pigmented women. They’ve identified four types of bias that may explain what’s happening:

1) Racial Bias. This one’s obvious. A blonde mane is not only useful in getting through airport security faster, but it’s also an extra little booster of whiteness for your next promotion.

2) Attractiveness Bias. There is an actual century of evidence on blondes being the better looking, more fun, more accessibly sexy counterparts. Betty & Veronica, I’m looking at you.

3) Preference for warmth in women. Apparently blonde women are seen as “kindler and gentler.” Given the vitriol I’m spitting on this very post, I’ll just go ahead and take their word for it. I’m decidedly not blonde.

4) Youth bias. You look younger I guess? Embedded in this point is the fact that women cover up their grey religiously because if they don’t, it’s a sign of having “let themselves go” or being tired and haggard (the horror!). Greying men instead merely look like silver foxes with well-padded wallets and a youth bias of their own.

So yes, here we are, in 2016, walking on eggshells, touching up our roots, trying to be as non-threatening as possible in order to be afforded the right to demonstrate competence and the capacity to lead. Cool.

I have a confession. I’m a complete hypocrite. Ok, not so much a confession as a baseline assumption for most humans, but still.

I realized it at an Italian restaurant. I was eating a capriccio pizza in the most offensive way. Avoiding the crust, peeling away most of the cheese, picking around the puddles of drizzled oil. Basically I was mastering the art of pretending to eat pizza and doing it in the least appetizing way possible. My younger sister looked at me with her face contorted into a blend of anger, disgust and pity. “She doesn’t even eat. It’s like she has an eating disorder or something.” I immediately felt guilty. Being five years older, I was supposed to be her role model. The strong, independent, confident, brilliant, understated yet fabulous older sister. And here I was, a cliché. Part of an “n” in some vague college survey statistic stating that 35% of the 95% of women dieting end up dieting pathologically.

It would take me another year to notice that maybe I did actually have a problem.
I grew up being slim. “So pretty. Just like a Barbie doll.” Relatives mashallah-ed my figure, my face, my grades. It became an identity. A valuation. I was pretty and I was smart. This was my truth.

Then I went to college.

What I gained in pounds, I lost in GPA points. My report cards and dorm room mirror reflected a person I didn’t know how to be. A person who soon became the roommate I never wanted. I dragged her weight around from early morning class to half-assed gym sessions, still uncomfortable with the association. Four years later, we graduated together, still at odds.

My post-grad experience was filled with external validation. I came out of the shadows and basked in the glow of professional praise and romantic interest. But it wasn’t enough. Every photo seemed to capture a person I still didn’t see as being me.

“Beauty comes from within.”

Sure, but my “within” was without solace from the torment of stretch marks crawling under my skin. I felt that the vessel that carried me was betraying me. So I started to betray it right back. Food was the villain. Running shoes the hero. It became a positive feedback loop where the more weight I lost, the less I was willing to eat “bad” foods. At the time, it felt like I was finally regaining control over who I wanted to be. What I didn’t notice was that the confidence I was building was paper-thin – entirely reliant on a few numbers that I had set as benchmarks for my worth. I should mention. We’re talking 20 lbs here. I was tormented over basically nothing. Embarrassingly silly.

At work, I’d write about empowering women to stand against external pressures that undermine their worth, to overcome unhealthy behaviours triggered by commercial quest for profit. Then I’d go home to work out and eat four pieces of rice. At the bar, I’d be enthusiastically discussing body positivity and being confident women who don’t shrink away but rather refuse to apologize for existing. Then I’d go home feeling guilty about the 164 calories worth of wine I’d just had.

I warned you. Hypocrite.

That day, over the oily carcass of the innocent capriccio pizza, my sister’s uncomfortable face shamed me into re-examining my own hypocrisy. The process took a year, but by the end of it, I ate pizza like a normal human being. My workouts became about being stronger, not smaller. As my focus shifted away from shrinking, my strength grew. Not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally.

The process is far from complete. Sometimes I still look at food and see calories where there should be joy. Or I drag my tired body onto a yoga mat and sweat the small stuff. But I’ve also finally started to be grateful to my body.

It. Is. Amazing. All bodies are. They’re a collection of bone and tendon and flesh that magically come together to do the most incredible things. They help us show our strength, our grace. And where necessary, they also help us weather storms or clouded judgment.

I have a problem. When framing my problems to external audiences (boss, friends, strangers, boyfriend), I compulsively force everything into this stupid, false optimism-shaped mold. I’ve been praised for this.

“My challenge is that I’m struggling to get everything in order for this project to meet deadline, but it gives our team an opportunity to BLAH BLAH BLAH”

My boss LOVES this.

I read back on some of my previous posts (blah, blah). They are not completely honest. I force a rose lens in conversations with everyone. (“This terrible thing happened, but you know, it’s not *that* bad because BLAH BLAH BLAH, it will be okay!”) I feel so much more doubt and hopelessness than I let on. And I think that is okay, to feel this.

I’m so concerned with being flexible, optimistic, positive. Where does this come from? Is it a female condition? I’m strong, yes. I’m optimistic and bright and resilient. Yes, I pride myself on this. But where did I learn that I concede weakness if I present my struggle and my sadness and my hopelessness without a delusional tint of optimism?

I want to approach my struggles with grace, and with grace I think comes a degree of optimism and hope. But I am doing myself no favors when I strap those stupid fucking rose glasses onto my face.

It’s an old pastime of young girls to imagine their future selves, embodied in a future name – written and signed. Using the last name of a crush, perhaps, just to see how it all fits together, and the vibrations through the air as it rolls off the tongue. It sounds just perfect, and so does the imagined pride of having this new identity, to be this new someone that matters to a particular someone. This pastime is learned at a young age and continues into adulthood. Don’t even try to deny it now. It is learned at a young age that we, as girls, take our husband’s surname – because we will marry. Most girls learn this from their mother and their own family. Mom took dad’s name – and that is how the world works.

There has been a lot of chatter around whether a woman should take the name of her husband’s. And a lot of judgment. It isn’t a new discussion. There are a number of ways that this could go.

The traditionalist: a woman changes her family name to her husband’s upon marriage.

The relegation: adding the new name last, demoting her name to a middle name that is really never used, let’s be honest.

The egalitarian: the abhorred hyphen.

The keeper: no change. You modern woman, you.

The feminist: man takes her name – I know, rare. It happens. So for completeness, humor me here.

There are issues with each of these options, as there are issues with the concept and act of committing to sharing your entire life forever with a single, often dynamic, person in an unstable world of circumstance. But, that is a discussion for another time.

Now, a necessary aside: this is coming from the perspective of a straight, (partially) white, educated, middle-class female and in the context of getting married, though there are plenty of other reasons to be changing your name. Changing names with the added attachment of another person, however, brings about these particular complex and curious ruminations.

Judgment is always passed on our choices. This choice in particular puts a label on an identity. This change is out in the open, on exhibition to the public. This change brands a shiny new scarlet A – there to be recognized and acknowledged, and judged. She’s anti-feminist. She’s lost herself. She’s attached. She’s no longer her own individual. She doesn’t care about her career and what this will do to her professional life. The hyphen is so unattractive. It makes your name too long, how inconvenient. The name no longer speaks to a pure heritage. It’s a jumbled mess. She doesn’t want to be attached to him. She doesn’t want to label herself. She doesn’t love him enough. And, how emasculating.

Why the judgment? Why is so much physical and virtual brain space dedicated to this choice?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

But names carry so much, even if all they hold is a mental construct to which we are unwillingly subjugated by the perceptions of others. It’s the first experience of labeling and identity about which we usually have little choice in today’s Western society. And it follows you around. It is a label, that once attached, is to encapsulate a personality, career, self-image, judgment, and social experience – and the choice is so seemingly arbitrary. So what does it mean to change it, when it’s been established and when, say, things like marriage maybe come along? Well, with all of the hullabaloo about it, we seem to think it means a lot.

Much of this discussion has been built around the rise of the “career woman” and how we must lean in to get ahead in this world. In the relatively new professional world of females, keeping one’s name has become an indicator of an independent, ambition-driven woman, entrenched in circumstances where her own brand carries weight enough to warrant breaking tradition and forever attaching her label to her past, current, and future achievements. Alternatively, she could simply like her name, just the way it is.

Still, there are long lists of how-tos that in themselves reflect the impending judgment and re-evaluation. You’re urged to introduce it in the right way to soften the blow: “How to Change Your Name and Keep Your Professional Identity,” “Changing Your Name? Tips for the Workplace,” how to write that first email. Regardless of how it’s done, you can hear it already, “Oh…, she got married. And this makes it different from before. She has concerns and obligations to someone else, and relationships and character facets that I can’t discern from over here.” When taking marriage and a changed surname as public announcement of a woman’s capacity for care and empathy but also dependence, this change can be perceived as weakness. This decidedly does not pair well with the image of the career woman.

So, here it is. The public discussion and judgment and professional & social reception and identity and brand, all laid out in various spaces of physical and virtual reality. So, how does one choose?

I consider myself independent, a feminist. My career is important to me. My name is attached to things. Regardless of whether or not I get married, it’s a choice that captures identity and forces greater understanding of its facets and veiled values. So…would I change my name?

The conclusion that I’ve come upon is that this choice is a deeply personal one, which means high variation for different kinds of people and different circumstances. Anti-climactic, I know. I’m sorry to disappoint. I never claim to have these answers. I’m better at the questions. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll share my thoughts of the moment on the matter and how others might start to think through this choice.

To begin with, it’s simple. Based on my most primitive fancies, what do I want? Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t particularly like my name – its appearance, spelling, sound. I’m not attached to it in the way I find that many are – by their family life and experiences. My last name has never carried the label feature, characteristic of my identity in the same way as my first name. Instead, it floats in my wake, as if connected by a shimmering string of a spider web, easily severed.

Names seem to fit others, while I’ve always had a hard time saying and explaining my own. It’s something I’ve been working on getting used to and I’d say it’s been growing on me for nearly 25 years now. Based on this, my choice seems moderately straightforward: welcome a change that may be more fitting. However, I work in a space where keeping your published name is ideal, if only for the sake of convenience, historic record, respect, and recognition. This is the challenge. What is to be weighed?

Again, my primordial inclination is to say fuck others’ perceptions and judgments and do what you feel. But then, years of socialization force some level of rationalized discussion. These changes induce perceptions and judgments that affect, if only by a smidgeon, respect, recognition, and experience. And experience shapes your life. Or maybe I’m making a bigger deal of this whole thing than it really is.

Luckily or not, I still have time to make my choice. Or I think I do. All I can say if it comes to it is that I hope that I will be the one to shape the name and what it means as applied to me in my past, present, and future – and not all the rest of it.

Setting the stage for what was to be a wildly uncomfortable 9 minutes of unwanted bar conversation, he inserted himself into our circle with a single sarcastic utterance of the word. It rolled off his tongue with the same casual ignorance of a Gwen Stefani song. There we were – four girls – three of which look vaguely “ethnic,” body language completely closed off to passer-bys, and yet here he was – entitled to have his say, to be heard, to be validated. “Made in Asia?” he states pointing to a couple of us. I’m immediately bored. I know this conversation by heart. And so does anyone who doesn’t look like they could’ve come to the Mayflower’s reunion. “Where are you from?” – Insert X predominantly-white-albeit- cultural-mosaic/ melting-pot-country – “No, but where are you from?” “Carbon, you asshole. I’m mostly Carbon.” But instead… “Oh well my parents are from Y-acceptably-non-white-country-that explains-my-complexion-my-dark- features–and-confirms-the asker’s need for a “different” tickbox.” Then the conversation goes down one of two paths. The asker either smiles knowingly, pleased with their keen eye, or he/she spews a series of invariably misguided facts/ question about country Y. There’s also a third path which is generally much more pleasant and leads to a real conversation about place and identity and culture and leaves both parties feeling enriched, but that conversation doesn’t often start with “but where are you from.” The uninvited guest last night didn’t stop there however. He went on to comment on the beauty of eyes that go like this, pulling at the side of his face, before carrying out a lengthy inquisition about our choice to live in a country that’s not our own.

I’d been under the impression that passive aggressive, systemic, or otherwise discrete racism was the way to go in this day and age…

So why was this man so unbelievably inappropriate? And blatantly racist?

– Lack of exposure to multiculturalism? Maybe.

– One too many Vodka Cranberries? Possibly.

– A systemic, entrenched sense of entitlement to voice any and all opinions and to have them be deserving of acknowledgment? Definitely.

– The right to be loud and proud? Always.

At 7 years old, I learned that my ankles were too loud. I had been wearing white capris at the airport and my mother was chided by the security guard for raising a slut. I think he took the “never wear white after labour day” a little too heavily to heart. At 8, my hair became too loud and was tamed under a veil. At 9, we moved somewhere where my hair and ankles could sing, but my voice was only tolerated. I became quiet, polite, a model student. Eventually, because my parents are awesome, I found my voice again (albeit metaphorically given that I probably still need a microphone to be heard across the dinner table), but I’d been trained to use it carefully.

Nevermind the absurd racism, the “Konichiwa” greeter was imposing himself on us as a man and allowing himself to judge our looks, our lifestyles, our core. You would be hard-pressed to find a women who would make similar comments to a group of men regardless of lack of exposure to multiculturalism or too many vodka cranberries, whereas the reverse is so much more common. You could argue that it’s because men still feel they have to take on the role of pursuer, and that’s all he was doing. But no, it was so much more (read: less?) than that. It was aggressive, it was with a sense of ownership and entitlement, and it was entirely unresponsive to the reactions he was receiving.

We should all grow up believing that we are deserving of being loud and proud, but with a level of critical thought, kindness and reflection. Otherwise, the resulting cacophony from the chorus of imbeciles is enough to make the US congress sound like Chopin.

I’ve experienced something new this week. I’ve found out what it means to be a man. Specifically, what it means to have the distracting tunnel vision that seems to cloud logical thought and reason all because of sex – “the sex drive of a man,” if you will. Now, moving past the inherent sexism of using those words together to suggest that women’s libidos are typically meager (as this is definitely not the case), let’s accept it for the time being for the sake of understanding each other.

So, I’m having major struggles. Work is not going efficiently at the moment. I need to talk about this. And I have a thought, eyes wide – is this what men deal with everyday, all the time?

So, of course, I ask the experts. Evidence from my small sample size suggests that the short answer is: yes.

From this, I only have more questions alongside greater empathy for the constant struggle. For example, how do you regularly cope with wanting sex multiple times a day, at least every couple of days? How do you concentrate for more than 20 minutes? What is the “typical” ideal frequency of sex? What do you do when your partner isn’t up for sex as much as you’d like? How do you deal with this issue in a long distance relationship? I only have more questions and my newly found respect.

Maybe I’m a little late to the party. It’s taken me some time to deal with other issues before having the capacity to embrace different aspects of who I am and confront the minute details of my sexuality. While it’s only been a few weeks of this awareness, I have a sneaking suspicion that this may well be my steady state. Over these past few weeks, I’ve reaffirmed my understanding that life inevitably changes and wants, desires, and states of mind, fluid – matters of perspective. Like many questions, answers to mine are understandably different from person to person. Luckily, I have ample time to figure them out for myself.